


fall silently

by voksen



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Body Horror, Character Death Fix, Gen, Illustrated, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 17:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/pseuds/voksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Javert steps off the bridge; everything goes wrong from there.</p><p>(aka the one where Javert grows wings)</p>
            </blockquote>





	fall silently

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drcalvin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drcalvin/gifts).



Javert intends to meet his death with eyes open; to tear the last of his blindness away and cast it from him, though he does not expect to avoid what awaits him by doing so. He looks up into the starless sky, out over the now-sleeping city, and then, finally, down. The water below him is as black as the heavens. It foams white where the rapids leap, brief splashes of light, the moon behind clouds.

He removes his hat, sets it on the parapet, and steps up beside it. He waits a moment, not in hesitation, for his purpose is clear and there is no doubt in his heart; he is only awaiting further orders. When none come, he squares his shoulders, leans forward, and falls.

It is not fear that betrays him but the world: he had not counted on the wind, how it would rip at him as he fell and sting his eyes in the few brief seconds that remain. He does not close his eyes - he does not mean to close his eyes - he only blinks - and in that heartbeat a great and unseeable hand reaches from the sky and his back is split asunder. 

He is in the water a second later. The impact comes with less force than it should have, but the ripping, ragged agony along his shoulderblades and down his spine is too great for him to consider his broken fall. It is overwhelming and all-consuming, like he is traced with lines of fire, and he forgets beneath the weight of it that he had meant to die.

But swimming has never been numbered among Javert's many skills. He thrashes helplessly in the water; something snatches at him again and again, tangling about him, yanking him above and below the surface in turns. He catches a mouthful of water; a lungful of air; breathes in choking gasping sobs, and then the current has swept him impossibly past the rapids and into a calmer stretch of river. 

Above Paris, the clouds part at last, scattered away by the same wind that had turned against him, and full moonlight floods the Seine. Javert splashes through its reflection, his body still fighting even as his mind reels, and catches sight at last of some great mass floating about him in the water. He jerks away on instinct; there is a pulling, a tearing ache at the stretch in his back that is fading from pain to pressure, and a deep visceral horror fills him. The thing in the water is something attached to him, he has been laid open and cannot feel it, this is not how he had meant to die, _it is keeping him afloat_ , for even when he holds his breath and wrests control of his body back and tries deliberately to sink beneath the waves he cannot; he is held, pinioned, by the span of shadow.

When he tries to touch it he grasps a handful of something wet and hot and slimy. He can feel it; he can feel the slick soft slide under his fingers, he can feel his fingers touching himself, and his mind shrinks desperately away. He has seen dying men, gutted on switchblades and prison shivs, trying to hold their bellies together with their hands. He had thought once to end like that on the point of Valjean's knife. He does not understand how - why - what has become of him.

Between the river's flow and his own flounderings he makes his way to the bank at last, drags himself free of the clinging water, flopping up into the mud half on his side, half on his front, and curls there, panting, staring at nothing. Behind him, he can feel a quiver, a stretch; he curves his shoulders, as if to defend himself, and a tall shadow rises over him.

Javert turns his head, looks up, and sees an immense gray-feathered wing, easily the length of his body, stretching heavenward. It flutters as he stares; he feels the tremble echo down into his bones. He thinks, unaccountably, of Monsieur Madeleine.

I must be dismissed at once, he had said years ago. Monsieur le Maire, I have disgraced my post, I have disgraced this town, I have disgraced you; I must be punished for what I have done. It is not enough that I should resign.

Madeleine - Valjean - _Madeleine_ \- had looked up from fidgeting at something on his desk and essayed a wide and shining smile at him, the twin to the one he had worn the day Javert had first met him, before the old man and the cart, before his suspicions had begun. No, Javert, he had said. Dismissed? No. You deserve a promotion.

A promotion. The remembered words ring in his head like the clamor of cathedral bells.

The soft whisper of feather against feather is a terrible echo; the aquiline quills splay out as if he were looking at the fingers on his hands. It is impossible - it is equally impossible to deny that it is a part of him when he can feel each tiny shift in the air stirring between the barbs of the raised wing, urging him up. At his back the other wing, half pressed into the mud, gives a twitching jerk as if it too wishes to stretch on high.

He had not been dismissed in Montreuil-sur-Mer. He had instead been promoted - even as Madeleine had ordained. If this is a promotion in turn he cannot think what it can mean. It cannot be that God is Jean Valjean. It is too much that he is reformed, it is too much that he is a saint, he cannot bear it as it stands, to add more weight to his sins will crush him beneath them wholly. Javert's hands dig deep gouges into the soft wet dirt of the riverbank as he kneels, grasping after his lost balance on the world that has twice rejected his resignation. He can feel grit and muck creeping up under his fingernails. He cannot think of a more earthly, a more banal sensation.

The laugh that tears itself free of his unwilling throat holds too little of humor and too much of madness; the tension that seizes his chest and shoulders sends his iron wings rustling and a patter of river-water falling down about him like rain.

**Author's Note:**

> [beorntobewild's amazing illustration](http://beorntobewild.tumblr.com/post/74961651083/based-on-voksens-fic-fall-silently-i-kept)


End file.
